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With the new tanks system, NMEA2000 tank systems have no way to name tanks. My TankRepeater (no longer usable as of v2.70~15 ) provided a /CustomName property and as I understand it, the analog tank inputs also have a way to customize the name.
I don't know where the service names are coming from but "Black water (sewage) tank (1)" is wayyyyyy over the top in terms of a label for the tank tiles in the Mobile Overview. Even "Fresh water tank (2)" is more than will fit on the tile.
I would agree that having the same name on all devices would be ideal, but there needs to be a fall-back mechanism that provides useful information to the end user.
Because not all sensors are going to have a way to name tanks, it then becomes the responsibility of the system collecting data from multiple sensors to provide meaningful identification to the end user. That brings me back to requesting that Venus provide custom naming for all tanks it displays.
You DO provide a way to change the fluid type within Venus so why not the tank's name too?
RVs often have two waste (aka Gray) water tanks and I've seen boats with multiple fresh water and fuel tanks. There is facility to change the fluid type but doing so would end up with very similar names, differentiated only by a number at the end of the name which is often not visible on the overview. The need is to label one waste tank "Galley" or fuel tanks "Port fuel" and "Starboard Fuel" so the user can know which tanks are which without resorting to a piece of paper taped next to the Venus display.
Another point in favor of custom tank names inside Venus: this is my ONLY tank display in my RV so there won't be any naming conflicts.
You should be able to provide local names for tanks and push those to the sensor if it's supported. But if not I don't want to be stuck with a tank named "Black water (sewa".
The fluid type is stored inside the sensor. Likewise we store the associated name there as well, "Free-form alphanumeric fields describing the installation (e.g., starboard engine room location) of the device and installation notes (e.g., calibration data)."
Naming devices and tanks is part of the standard, I have no idea why we should support devices not obeying to standards. For completeness we don't support the label pgn at the moment, we can consider adding that, but up to now there is no single customer asking for it.
Oh, and we have several other solutions for this, which will allow you to change its name. So for me it is really not an important issue, just rename the tank to whatever you like. More then 99% of our users with tanks can simply change the name to whatever they like.
I went with SeeLevel because it was the only solution of reasonable cost that I could display on my Venus device. Cost is a significant factor to me and to many others. Back then we needed to run special code on Venus to accommodate the multiple tanks from the same device. It worked well and I added custom names in that code. To "repeat" all incoming N2K tanks and hide the originals from all displays is no longer easy and would not propagate to VRM, so it would show twice the number of tanks.
I can cobble QML code to display reasonable names for my system but that won't likely propagate to others since every system would need customized QML code.
Really, what I'm asking for is a place to insert an alternate name in place of the autogenerated description.
And on the other hand, just get yourself a Cerbo or an usb tank stick. This is really a waste of time. It is already solved in many ways.
Cerbo does not get me tank sensors. I'd need to get Cerbo AND fit all my tanks with some other form of sensor. We're talking about huge $$$ for new sensors not to mention the cost of Cerbo which doesn't on its own support other than resistive sensors.
